More about Rob Burgess

 One of my long-time colleagues, Alain Chesnais, worked for Rob along the way.   Alain himself is a terrific graphics designer, who started (get ahold of this) working for Nicholas Negroponte in Paris in the 1980's, and then for Henri Gouraud on computer graphics.   Alain is a past ACM President, and a major award holder from SIGGRAPH.  Here's a bit about Alain from a 2023 SIGGRAPH interview

https://www.siggraph.org/inside-siggraph/member-profiles/profile/?member=alain-chesnais

Alain shared the following about Rob when I queried him this morning, as follows: Alain, its’ been awhile since we talked.

I hope you are well, and enjoying this phase of life.  I’m not sure that the “Golden Years” are quite as good as I’d hoped, but hey, still upright and breathing.

I just saw the obituary for Rob Burgess.  And naturally, I thought of you.  Any stories I could share?   I worked briefly with Rob in Santa Barbara when he was running Alias/Wavefront, and I think he was SGI’s first Canadian employee circa 1984, which ironically is the year I briefly worked at SGI also.

All the best

Chuck House

Alain quickly replied: "Hi Chuck,

Happy New Year! I have many stories concerning Rob. He was the best CEO I ever worked for. He knew how to set clear high level goals and then get out of the way to allow us to do our best work. For Maya, he gave the engineering team two goals:

• Be the number one 3D package in sales in the entertainment market within the first quarter of release
• Maintain that position for at least ten years

Those two goals helped us make the hard choices in terms of what we would implement. Every proposed new feature was compared against those two goals and we prioritized the features that would help us achieve both. One of the key choices that this helped us make early on was to make Maya multi platform. In a brainstorming session we asked which OS would be dominant in the 3D creative space ten years in the future and realized that we could not make that call. So we decided to design Maya to be portable from the beginning. We abstracted out all of the system dependencies into an OS abstraction that all calls had to go through. The first release would be SGI only, but we already knew we needed to have a Windows version quickly. I had been benchmarking how quickly graphics performance was accelerating on the various OS platforms and noticed that PC graphics performance was doubling roughly every 6 months and that was supported by a platform where you could simply swap out your graphics board rather than have to replace the whole machine, like you did on SGI. What became apparent to us way before Maya 1.0 released in February 1998 was that we had less than 3 years to provide a PC version before the cost effectiveness of PC based solutions would far surpass dedicated UNIX based solutions at SGI. We ended up hiring a team of 6 engineers in Seattle in secret to implement the PC version of Maya. Work started before the release of Maya 1.0 and we released the Windows version at SIGGRAPH in the summer of 1998 when nobody knew that we were working on it. The project was so secret that only the senior management and the engineering team actually working on it knew what we were doing until we were almost ready to release it. The story we told MS, who was a direct competitor since their acquisition of Softimage,  when requesting an MSDN subscription was that we were looking to port Applied Geometry NURBS library to Windows.

All the best,
=Alain

How about that?   "BEST CEO I EVER WORKED FOR".     I couldn't resist, so I asked Alain for permission to post this superb response.   Here's his reply:  

Absolutely! All of this is OK to share. I first spoke about it publicly 2 years ago for a Toronto SIGGRAPH chapter meeting at the Autodesk facilities in Toronto to celebrate the 25 years of the first release of Maya.

There are many people posting about Rob. I'm sure that Mark Sylvester has quite a few tidbits to share as well. One thing that Rib always did extremely well was to recognize the accomplishments of the people who worked under him. It was so motivating to get called out during a company meeting when you delivered on a goal. You knew that Rob noticed what everyone did and made a point of recognizing it publicly. He pushed hard for results, but always remembered to say thank you. I learned a lot about effective leadership from him.

Pete Santangelli posted a great anecdote about working for Rob (which I have included in the next post).